[Qemu-devel] [RFC] Architecture to connect a userspace ethernet switch to QEMU guests via Virtio

[Antonios Motakis]

Hello,

There have been discussions before on these lists on the topic of
connecting a QEMU guest running a virtio_net driver, with an external
userspace ethernet switch (Snabbswitch in particular). The essential
requirement in this is to put the virtio backend in the external
userspace process.

The preferred direction should be similar to vhost, with the main
difference of the control mechanism being a unix domain socket instead
of an ioctl interface, and of course placing the backend in an
userspace process instead the kernel.

Since we are pursuing this direction,we would like to share a more
detailed description of the architecture we are working on. Any
feedback is most welcome. It is available here:
http://www.virtualopensystems.com/media/snabbswitch/rfc_snabbswitch_qemu.pdf

Best regards,
Antonios Motakis
Virtual Open Systems